bugs

There are annual cicadas. Then there are 13-year cicadas. And 17-year cicadas. Then there are days like today when 13 and 17 year cicadas emerge from the ground around the same time, creating a fairly odd event in our backyard.

My daughters are helpfully pointing out a few of the thousands of holes in the ground around our yard—sites where cicadas have been emerging for the past two weeks.

Almost every day there's a new batch that starts climbing up the garden, the trees, the house, the barbecue grill, the kids toy box, the toys the kids leave in the yard... pretty much everything.

And then for a day or two you see them shedding their old skin, emerging, walking around a bit drunkenly, then eventually flying up into the trees.

Ansible Galaxy was recently updated to the 'Next Generation' (Galaxy-NG) codebase.

There are some growing pains, as a lot of Galaxy NG was built up around Collections, and Ansible role support was written into the codebase over the past year or so, after it became obvious Galaxy roles would not be deprecated.

Unfortunately, one of the major issues right now—which I'm seeing pop up in many places—is an error that occurs upon installation of Galaxy roles for any playbook (e.g. when you run ansible-galaxy install to download a role), for any role that has had a new version released in the past few weeks.

You wind up with an error like:

A few days ago, my personal AWS account's billing alert fired, and delivered me an email saying I'd already exceeded my personal comfort threshold—in the second week of the month!

Knowing that I had just rearranged my entire backup plan because I wanted to change the structure of my archives both locally and in my S3 Glacier Deep Archive mirror on AWS, I suspected something didn't get moved or deleted within my backup S3 bucket.

And I was right.

But I wanted to write this up for two reasons:

I recently migrated around ~50,000 photos and videos from Aperture to Photos (see my blog post on the process), and have also in a short amount of time upgraded my personal and work Mac laptops (both from older MacBook Airs to newer MacBook Pros).

On both of my new laptops—which were at least 3x faster than my older Airs—I noticed that Photos started completely fresh in its photo analysis for the 'People' album that shows everyone's faces. And after three weeks of seeing one of my CPUs stick around 100% all day every day (while plugged in), I started getting sick of this.

I would leave the Mac on all night, and check in the morning, and only 20-30 new faces would be recognized.

Some days it seemed it would take forever...

During today's Mass of Priesthood Ordination at the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, I was waiting for the procession to start outside the entrance, and decided to stand in the garden between the Cathedral and the rectory for a few minutes, even though the sun was beating down (93°F in the morning!).

I was rewarded with a wonderful shot of this interesting little bug:

I haven't done a lot of flower/closeup photography in a while, but it seems this picture turned out just right, without any work. It was a nice little moment in a rather hectic day.

I'll be posting tons of pictures from the Ordination on Flickr soon. Working on processing them now (I've already whittled down over 1,000 photos to 450ish).

Earlier today, when I was working on fixing a few little inconsistencies in my mail inboxes (I currently sync 5 different accounts (with a plethora of email addresses feeding into the various accounts)), deleted messages started showing in some of my inboxes in Mac OS X's built in Mail app. They were greyed out, but not enough so that I could easily distinguish non-deleted messages...

After looking around online for a while, and not finding any fixes for this problem (I get so many emails that showing deleted messages basically makes my inbox unusable), I thought to search the Mail help for an answer.

Pesky little menu options!

I found a little menu item labeled "Show Deleted Messages" (Command-L keyboard shortcut), which somehow had been selected at some point (I can't think of why I would hit command-l in Mail... but I guess I did). Unchecking that hid the messages. Problem solved!

I spent the greater part of two hours trying to debug an Internet Explorer bug today. Basically, I wanted to get an image that I uploaded to have a caption applied through jQuery. I used the Image Caption module for Drupal to do this, and set it to grab the 'alt' text in a <span> underneath the image, and wrap both the image and caption inside another <span>, which would grab the float/alignment for the image, and use that to float it left or right (or neither).

Well, in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, the image would appear on its own line, as a block-level element. I tried everything short of throwing my computer against a wall to get this to work, but was unsuccessful. I finally went for broke and tried some thing so dumb that it couldn't possibly work—but it did.

I changed the order of the inline css properties in the script so the float would be applied before the "display: block" value. Bingo, IE works great!

Some things that I have to do to get things to work in Explorer... I hate you, Microsoft!!